1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to apparatus and method for detecting a traffic lane mark (,i.e., a white line and/or a yellow line) drawn on a road surface using a camera (CCD camera) mounted on an automotive vehicle and for outputting an information such as a contour (or shape) and a position of the traffic lane.
2. Description of the Related Art
A Japanese Patent Application First Publication No. Heisei 8-249597 (JP8249597) published on Sep. 27, 1996 exemplifies a previously proposed traffic lane mark detecting apparatus.
In the previously proposed traffic lane detecting apparatus disclosed in the above-described Japanese Patent Application First Publication includes: a photograph device to photograph a situation of a running road in a vehicular forward direction; an edge point extracting section that extracts edge components from image data of the photograph device; a window setting section that sets a plurality of windows in a manner to include a traffic lane indicating line (so-called, traffic lane mark) from the image data which extracts the edge components; an edge point counting section that counts point numbers of edges present on each line segment for all line segments which can be generated by connecting mutual points on two lateral sides facing each other on each window set by the window setting section; a straight line detecting section that detects one of the line segments which has a largest edge point count value obtained for each window by the edge point counting section as a detected straight line within a corresponding window of the respective windows; an interrupted vehicle detecting section that detects a preceding vehicle which has entered the same traffic lane in front of the vehicle (hereinafter, also called a host vehicle) from another neighboring traffic lane (hereinafter, called an interrupted preceding vehicle); a weight value modifying section that modifies a weight value to any windows in which the interrupted preceding vehicle is detected; and a road contour detecting section that detects the traffic lane indicating line according to the detected straight line of each window and the weight value thereof and detects a road contour according to the detected traffic lane indicating line. Thus, an accuracy of the detection of the traffic lane indicating line can be improved and the detection thereof can be processed at a high speed.